


Something to Remember

by citron_presse



Category: Chicago Fire
Genre: Drug Addiction, Gen, Withdrawal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-31
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-23 04:20:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/618007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/citron_presse/pseuds/citron_presse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>He repeats the self-assurance that <b>he’ll work it out</b> like a mantra, right up until Thursday, well after his shift started, when he has to accept the fact that he hasn’t and he won’t. </em>Severide goes through narcotic withdrawal and comes out the other side. Set in the days following episode 1.10.  Spoilers through the 1.11 preview.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Something to Remember

**Author's Note:**

  * For [waltzmatildah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/waltzmatildah/gifts).



> Prompt - _I'm not looking to the sky for a reason to live_ , title and quoted lyrics are from _Open Letter_ by The Amity Affliction.

 

 

 

_This is my open letter_  
 _This is something to remember_  
 _I won't be buried before my time_

\- - - - -

  
  
He leaves Anna four voicemails. Increasingly panicked variations on the theme of:  
  
 _My friend’s in the hospital. I’m sorry . . . she’s not doing well, and I forgot. We could meet now . . . or later tonight, maybe?_  
  
She doesn’t call back. The fifth time, he hangs up without speaking, the barrier of her greeting and her ongoing silence making it very clear that she’s either playing with him or done. It’s probably what he deserves for using Shay as an excuse, for even talking about her in the same breath his little sex and drugs arrangement.  
  
A part of him acknowledges that it’s probably what he deserves, period, before he forgets about that and starts making desperate plans. He has one pill left, eked out from a reduced dosage that’s not really cutting it, but he’ll work it out.  
  
He doesn’t think he could handle bedding Anna tonight, anyway.

\- - - - -

At the hospital, they tell him there’s no change in Shay’s condition. And, no, he can’t see her, despite – maybe, because of -- the flared moment of whispered tension when he calls the charge nurse a bitch.

He apologizes grudgingly, slumps into a hard plastic chair and waits.  
  
Around 2 a.m. he begins a cycle of sleeping, waking up, gasping for breath, to a stiffened neck, a shoulder like concrete, fractured memories of burning walls, collapsing floors, explosions, falling, paralysis, and, most of all, pain.  
  
At 5 a.m. he finds some coffee and swallows his last pill. He tells himself, again, he’ll work it out.

\- - - - -

“Why the hell is it so cold in here?” He’s freezing, shivering, as he drops down onto a chair. The others look at him, then at each other, clearly puzzled.  “Right, ‘cause no one else is cold!” he snaps, his illogical rage over something so pointless confounding him; more so, when the discomfort level at the table instantly at least triples, and yet he can’t seem to stop.  
  
Someone -- he’s not paying sufficient attention to know who exactly -- offers, mildly,

“You know what, Severide? I’m kinda warm,”  
  
and it’s as though someone lit a fuse in his head, a shitstorm of insult and aggression that has him wanting to lay someone’s, _anyone’s_ , ass out!  
  
A small, still part of his mind observes all this with a kind of horror and, with massive effort, he clamps down any outward sign worse than a tightened jaw. As he leans back in his chair, urging himself to relax, cracks open in the bone-deep chill running through his body and fill with radiating heat.  
  
Realization hits him, and he bites back a groan. Irritability. Paranoia. Feeling cold and warm at the same time. Early symptoms of withdrawal, word for word what he googled (at least ten times now, hoping for the non-existent entry where it said everything would be fine, that he wasn't on them long enough), and all he’s done so far is cut down for a few days.  
  
Fucking great.

\- - - - -

“So . . . uh . . . hey.” He smiles at Dawson, aiming for appeasement.

She doesn’t reply. Briefly glances up, then carries on sorting through medical supplies.  
  
“Gabby,” he tries again. “I . . . uh . . .” She ignores him eloquently, and he loses patience. “Would you please look at me?!”  
  
She stops, stares, raises an eyebrow, frowns. “What?!” she demands.  
  
He swallows, tells himself to calm down. “Sorry. I’m just . . .I’m having a hard time with Shay in . . . ” Yet again, he’s using her as an excuse, and he trails off, guilt gnawing at the tiny fraction of his mind that still feels something other than anxiety about himself. “How is she?” he asks.  
  
She shrugs. “ _You_ were at the hospital,” she says, hostile in a way that makes his insides flinch. “No change. They’re still not letting anyone see her.”  
  
He nods, runs his tongue nervously over his lips. Even if _they_ were letting people see Shay, he doubts very much _she_ would want to see _him_. “Right,” he says, pointlessly, and Dawson’s eyebrow rises a disdainful fraction higher.  
  
“What did you do to her?” she asks.  
  
“She didn’t tell you?” he asks, playing for time, hating himself for the relief he feels when she shrugs an angry _No_. “Then, I . . .uh . . . we had a fight,” he says. “I . . .” He takes a breath, exasperated with himself, exasperated with Dawson. He doesn’t have time for this (doesn’t have the heart for it, either). “Look, I hurt my neck. I need something for the pain.”  
  
She studies him. “You know that’s not exactly news –” She begins, then breaks off, eyes boring into his. “Something?” she asks. “Something like Toradol, maybe?”  
  
He uses every shard of determination he has to offer a not very convincing, “Huh?”  
  
She shakes her head first, then her index finger. “You need to see a doctor,” she spits dangerously. “And you need to not speak to me about _anything, ever_ , are we clear?”

\- - - - -

“Anna, please . . .” He literally begs her voicemail. “I’ll meet you any time you want.” Inhales, swallows. “I’ll _do anything_ you want.”

He clutches his cellphone for hours, a hockey game playing on TV that he couldn’t recount one detail of if his life depended on it.  
  
Royce calls once, the jangling of the phone rousing out him of a half-doze. It’s not Anna, so he lets it go to voicemail.  
  
For a moment, he questions why. He likes her, he thinks she likes him, they have a good thing. He could talk to her. It might even help a little. He just can’t, it’s easier to hate himself for blowing her off. And for one stark moment, a flicker of terrifying comprehension, he gets how unequivocally, horrifically fucked-up he is.  
  
It passes, consumed by his frantic need to survive.

\- - - - -

He repeats the self-assurance that _he’ll work it out_ like a mantra, right up until Thursday, well after his shift started, when he has to accept the fact that he hasn’t and he won’t.

It’s been close to forty hours, he calculates, and he hasn’t left his apartment, hasn’t eaten, and he keeps drinking water, but only around half of it stays down. He can’t think, can’t hold the smallest, simplest idea in his head, because his mind is full of blur and haze and noise and pain. He’s so cold, through to his core, it doesn’t matter how many layers he adds, how many blankets he shrouds himself in, he can’t get warm. His shoulder, neck, arm, whole right side are shattering with a blaring agony he’d call unendurable, except for the fact he doesn’t have a choice.  
  
He’s in his bathroom, camped out on the floor because he crumpled there during a bout of vomiting and hasn’t yet mustered the will to move again. He still feels as sick as hell, and his stomach hurts, a heavy, burning ache that turns, without warning, into cramps that rip through him so hard he has to fight for breath, almost loses the frayed edges of lucidity he’s barely holding on to.  
  
The phone keeps ringing -- people who are always not Anna -- and he feels like he’s being stalked, shrinks inside himself at its strident sound, as his head pounds, his ears rush, his heart races, scarily irregular, and his mind spins into an uproar of misery, shame and the same recurring nightmares.  
  
Shay.  
  
Vargas.  
  
Andy.  
  
Himself.  
  
Specters of firefighters, victims, falling, dropped, plummeting into chasms of flames and smoke, as his arm gives out, or he makes a wrong call, eyes locked with his until the last lost moment when they fade, melt, burn away forever.  
  
He squeezes his eyes closed to block out the apparitions. When it doesn’t work (just the opposite -- everything grows larger, clearer, more intense), he curls up, as small and tight as possible, head buried in his arms, futilely trying to hide from everything that has anything to do with his life.

\- - - - -

The phone rings again, startling him awake. Anna! He fumbles around blindly, until he locates the phone by touch, squints at the screen through blurry double vision and the dragging backdrop of nausea.

 _Not_ Anna. _Matt Casey._  
  
Shit!  
  
He drops the phone back on the floor, lets it ring out, as he props himself up against the shower stall, groaning as each tortured part of his body protests in turn.  
  
Silence, as the phone goes to voicemail, then,  
  
It rings again.  
  
He ignores it.  
  
Silence. Rings.  
  
Three times before he snatches it up and lobs it across the room.  
  
When it rings yet again, he’s relieved it’s still working, but still avoids Casey’s predictable recriminations. Along the lines, he guesses, of, _Where the hell are you?_ Except, if he were at the firehouse, it would be, _You should see a doctor_ or _This doesn’t just affect you._ For the sake of brevity, all the complaints can be reduced to: _You’re an arrogant, selfish prick!_  
  
Yeah? Well, maybe he has to be. Sooner or later, one way or another, everyone he cares about, every one who claims to care about him, leaves. Being a selfish prick is all he’s got.

\- - - - -

Three hours later, after he’s moved to the couch, slept a little, slowly sipped some water and not thrown it back up, remorse hits him, so violent, so obliterating that, for a moment, it almost eclipses the physical pain. It’s like the flicker of comprehension he had in the bathroom, except this time it doesn’t go away, and the pure urge for survival doesn’t in any way stack up against the facts.

He put countless people at risk because he couldn’t face up to his injury. He crapped on Shay’s loyalty, got her in trouble, put her in a position where she – and now, finally, crushingly, he hears her words properly – perjured herself for him. He’s a junkie: here, now, in reality, no longer a game he can kid himself he’s playing.  
  
Selfish prick is right. While he’s at it, let’s add blind and self-destructive, because one of the people he’s been putting at risk, driving into the ground until something breaks, is himself.  
  
Jesus fucking Christ, Severide! What the fucking fuck were you thinking?!

\- - - - -

On the edge of sleep, gentler and clearer, he gets that what he was thinking was this:

He has a broken heart.  
  
From a father who blanked him out until the day he was accepted for the academy (and even then the bonding lasted about a day and a half), to the lies he told himself when Shay walked out the door, and everything in between.  
  
He has a broken heart and he’ll put anything, everything, anyone between himself and the feelings that go with that.  
  
The tragedy is, though, that the only person breaking his heart right now is him.

\- - - - -

The phone wakes him, vibrating beneath his neck, wedged where it fell between his skin and the fabric of the couch.

It’s Casey again, and his default pissed-off-ness kicks in for a second, until something penetrates, an unbroken fragment, desperate for this to end, that thanks God, or whoever's watching out for him, that his boats aren’t as well and truly burned as they probably ought to be.  
  
“Hey,” he says, on the third hoarse attempt to make his voice work.  
  
“It’s about time!” There’s a pause on the other end of the line, then, “I was beginning to think you’d died.”  
  
“Well,” he swallows, emotions sending him reeling in every direction at once, but mostly profound gratitude that Casey’s such a persistent bastard. “That, uh . . . that makes two of us.”  
  
He suddenly wants to tell Casey he loves him. Because he fucking does! He wants to take buckets of flowers to the hospital, fill Shay’s room with them, tell her, not from guilt or dependence, just from a new, raw, resurrected place, _I don’t deserve you, I’m sorry, I love you too, and I will always stick my neck out for you! I’ll get help, I’ll get the surgery, I’ll tell Boden is was me, just please wake up!_ He wants to hug Dawson, whatever she thinks about that, for treating him exactly how he deserved, and somehow still not turning him in.  
  
There’s shit to clean up first, though, so he tells Casey he’ll see him tomorrow, hangs up the phone, and sits, motionless, uncoiling inside, as tears form in his eyes at the pure, mind-blowing, unfamiliar experience of reprieve.

\- - - - -

He sleeps ten hours straight, showers, forces a few spoonfuls of cereal into his queasy, still burning stomach -- he has to eat something, and takes a cab to the firehouse. The pain in his neck is horrible, but he’ll deal with it, he’s seeing a doctor later today.  
  
Boden’s expecting him. Most likely to show off the side of himself he promised Kelly wouldn’t forget.  
  
Right before he puts him on disability.  
  
And he’s terrified, scared out of his mind, and with nothing muffling the fear the way he’s grown accustomed to. But whatever happens, at least he won’t be locked inside his past; won’t be lying on his own bathroom floor; won’t be a hostage to everything about himself that he refuses to face.  
  
From the cab window, he takes in the Chicago streets, the sunlight sparkling on a touch of snow, still white, left over in the gutters. He hadn’t even known it snowed. Snow means vehicle wrecks. The guys were probably busy the last few days.  
  
He smiles, laughs softly, because being nearly alive is so much cooler than being almost dead.  Even if it hurts.

 

 - - - - -

  
_I'm not searching the sky for a reason to live_  
 _'cause I found beauty right here and found the passion to give_  
 _So let me give you my heart, let me give you my tears_  
 _Let me give you my life, let me give you my fears_


End file.
